The present invention relates generally to improved methods and apparatus for development and management of training courses. More particularly, the invention relates to advantageous techniques for creating, presenting and managing computer-based training courses.
Many companies and other organizations have a continuing need for cost-effective ways to train employees, which are easy to develop and convenient for the employees. This is particularly true in cases in which employees need to be trained in order to ensure that they conduct business in accordance with government regulations. Failure to comply with such regulations can prove costly to the business and can damage the reputation of the business. It is important that employees know what regulations are in force, how these regulations affect them and what steps to take to insure that they comply with these regulations.
Training helps to make employees aware of what they need to do, and ongoing or periodic and reasonably frequent training and evaluation of employee knowledge helps to keep the information fresh so that employees continue to maintain good practices. In order to provide ongoing or periodic training, it is highly beneficial to make the training inexpensive to the company and convenient for the employee. An employee can be expected to be more conscientious about undertaking required training if he or she can schedule the training and take advantage of it when desired. An employee's ability to schedule training also improves the employee's productivity, because an employee can schedule training at times when it will not interfere with other pressing work.
In order to make sure that employees comply with training requirements, it is important to be able to administer training so as to correctly identify employees requiring training in a particular area, to provide appropriate training to those employees at appropriate times, to remind employees when they should undertake training and to make sure that employees have completed training as expected and that they have successfully gained the knowledge expected from the training. It is important to assemble information relating to training and to make this information accessible to managers and other personnel who need to understand what training activities are going on and how well employees are achieving the results expected from training.
It is also beneficial if the course development process and tools used in course development are relatively easy to understand and use, so that anyone with a sound grasp of the course material can design a course without encountering undue obstacles presented by the course development process or the equipment used to develop a course. The absence of technical obstacles increases the number of persons who can develop courses and also tends to increase the quality of courses by relieving pressure that might otherwise exist for courses to be developed by persons proficient with the course development tools, whether or not such persons have the greatest knowledge of the course material.
It is also beneficial to provide a central repository for course information and student information as it relates to courses, so that course material can be easily retrieved, edited and modified, and comments from users and reviewers of the course material can be stored in a central location, with comments about a course associated with that course. Providing a central repository also allows easy monitoring of student compliance with course requirements and progress in completing courses, allowing a manager or other responsible person to be notified early in order to insure that a student completes courses as scheduled.